An All-Star memory sealed with a kiss

Updated 10:00 pm, Thursday, July 5, 2001

Morganna latches on to George Brett during the 1979 All-Star Game in the Kingdome. Click for a larger image

Morganna latches on to George Brett during the 1979 All-Star Game in the Kingdome. Click for a larger image

Photo: AP

An All-Star memory sealed with a kiss

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She hung up her lips.

"Morganna the Kissing Bandit," who for more than two decades became baseball's unofficial mascot by jumping onto fields and bussing unsuspecting players -- including George Brett at the 1979 All-Star Game in the Kingdome -- has kissed the game goodbye.

"Three or four months ago, she called me up and said, 'I'm retiring,'" her Tulsa-based agent Jon Terry said. "I have no information on why it was so abrupt, as she was someone who obviously loved attention.

"I don't if she thought she was too old or if it was a health problem. But she was as vivacious as ever. She's the grand dame of baseball."

Morganna Roberts, herself, isn't saying. She didn't return calls from the P-I seeking an interview. Nor did she respond to earlier requests by Sports Illustrated or Playboy, which had to be particularly galling for the men's magazine, since it once had featured her in a nude pictorial.

It's possible that time and political correctness finally caught up to her, nothing more.

An overly buxom woman who used to dress in hot pants and a tight shirt for her madcap dashes, Morganna is 47 now. She's no spring -- or San Diego -- chicken.

And, face it, she's been doing her player smooching in the minors for much of the past decade.

"She was greeted with a polite response from the 1,300 in the stands," a Charleston, W.Va., columnist wrote recently of a Morganna visit.

A Kentucky native, Morganna was 17 when she attended a 1971 Cincinnati Reds game and a friend dared her to run out on the field at Riverfront Stadium and give Pete Rose a kiss. Rose swore at her for the intrusion, then called her and apologized the next day.

It was the first of nearly two dozen big-league baseball kisses and one of hundreds involving entertainers and other athletes for Morganna, who realized the value of publicity. A Cincinnati sportswriter dubbed her the Kissing Bandit. It was a life of crime she could handle.

At the '79 All-Star game, Morganna waited seven batters before bounding onto the Kingdome field in the first inning and sprinting for Brett. He got a hug and a kiss. The Mariners were said to have paid for this moment, according to one source.

"Definitely not for the All-Star Game," said Randy Adamack, Mariners vice president with the club since 1978. "We might have done it a few years later, maybe air fare."

In 1986, Morganna showed up in Seattle during the first week of the season and targeted Yeager. A notorious tobacco-chewer, the catcher received only a peck on the cheek. The visit was strategic.

"I told my fans I was going to New York after Mattingly, but their security was ready for me, so I thought I'd surprise everybody," Morganna told the P-I's Art Thiel in a Kingdome security office that night. "I had been planning to kiss Yeager for quite a while. Fans kept suggesting him. I had a break in my schedule and this looked like a good time."

Along the way, Morganna became an exotic dancer, working regularly in Las Vegas, Houston and Oklahoma City. It was good money, sometimes $7,000 to $10,000 per week. In 1985, Morganna was even brought to Tacoma to highlight the grand opening of a local club, Night Moves. She danced topless, signed T-shirts and drew a huge crowd.

Her other line of work did not undermine her baseball popularity. She made appearances on Johnny Carson and David Letterman's late-night talk shows. She was a natural entertainer. She had a quick wit.

She referred to Dolly Parton as flat-chested, and for good reason -- Morganna's measurements were 60-23-39, all natural.

"Those are my baseball stats," she wisecracked.

Regarding Rose, she said, "I tell people my career started with a bet, and Pete's ended with one."

Garvey tried to run from her, prompting this one-liner: "I think he thought it was the start of a paternity suit."

Basketball player Charles Barkley was a cooperative target, who, according to Morganna, "kept talking to my cleavage while I kissed him."

On the wall of her Columbus, Ohio, home, she once hung a poster of Brett involved in a baseball brawl, with an inscription from the player: "Look, Morganna, I'm still defending your honor."

She often signed her autographs "With breast wishes, Morganna."

Her kissing vocation was not all laughs and giggles. She was arrested and charged with trespassing nearly 20 times, often spending 12 to 14 hours in jail and paying a $100 fine.

Yet things could get humorous at times. In court once, she had colorful Texas attorney Richard "Racehorse" Haynes argue the "Gravity Defense" on her behalf, that she had leaned over a rail and been naturally propelled onto the playing field because of her anatomy.

Case dismissed.

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All these years, Morganna bared just about everything except one well-hidden fact. She's been married to an accountant, Bill Cottrell, for 25 years.